Health roundup: Drug reformer to talk pot laws at UCI

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance and one of the nation's most prominent advocates for reforming the nation's drug laws, will give a lecture at UC Irvine on Tuesday night.

The lecture – "Stoners, Junkies, Science and the State" – will be held at 7 p.m. in the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering.

Nadelmann has said that recently passed state marijuana laws are evidence the nation is changing its position on pot. Last November, voters in Washington state and Colorado passed measures making marijuana legal, and subjecting it to state regulation and taxation. Marijuana for medicinal purposes has long been legal in California, with a prescription.

"This past year was the best ever for our growing movement to end the war on drugs," Nadelmann wrote on Huffington Post in December. "Marijuana legalization and broader drug policy reform have moved from the fringes to the mainstream of U.S. and international politics."

The federal government still bans the sale and use of marijuana, but public opinion appears to be heading the other way. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center said that 60 percent of Americans think the feds shouldn't supersede state marijuana laws.

U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Costa Mesa Republican, introduced a bill last weekend that would amend the federal Controlled Substances Act so that it would “not apply to any person acting in compliance with state laws” relating to marijuana.

Link between colic, teen migraines

The pain of colic can make infants miserable, and the pain of a migraine can be debilitating to an adolescent or teen. A new study shows these kinds of pain might be related.

A study conducted at a Paris hospital indicated that 72.6 percent of young people ages 6 to 18 who sought medical treatment for a migraine had suffered colic as a baby. Only 26.5 percent of kids who came to the hospital for other kind of trauma had had colic.

An editorial accompanying the study, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week, estimated that colic occurs in 16 to 20 percent of infants.

Meds cheaper at big-box stores

If there’s one thing you’d assume large chain pharmacies would do well, it would be competitive pricing on over-the-counter drugs. But an article in the May issue of ShopSmart says Target and Walmart beat the prices of the big chains every time.

The magazine, published by Consumer Reports, hired secret shoppers to compare prices on 185 non-prescription drugs at hundreds of stores across the country, including Target, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and supermarkets.

They found that Walmart had the lowest prices on 26 items, the most of any of the retailers; CVS had the highest prices on 18 items. Target offered the biggest savings on a single item: Its store-brand version of ibuprofen (24-count) is 73 percent cheaper than the store-brand item at Walgreens. Target’s website says the 24-count package is 97 cents.

ShopSmart says buying huge bottles of OTC medicine isn’t always the cheapest way to go, even though it might seem so. If you take a ton of Advil, for instance, the 300-pill bottle might be worth it (at $20.14, 7 cents per pill). But if you don’t take a lot, the medium size (200 pills for $14.82, 8 cents per unit) would be a better bet, because the drug might expire before you get a chance to consume it all.